Counting Backwards

A couple’s life is shattered by the husband’s diagnosis with early onset dementia. With furious compassion and
bracing black humor, Kirshenbaum documents the fading of the future they'd imagined and their displacement
into the alien and relentless world of Lewy body disease.
It begins with hallucinations. From their living room window, Leo sees a man on stilts, an acting troupe, a
pair of swans paddling on the Manhattan streets below. Initially, Leo believes the visions are related to his
terrible eyesight, something he and his wife, Addie, joke about. Then, he starts to experience occasional, but
fleeting, oddities. He's unable to perform simple tasks and he hears things that aren’t real. The doctors have
no answers, and his erratic disturbances multiply. Leo, 53, a scientist researching auto-immune diseases and
Addie, a collage artist, had a loving and happy marriage. They'd planned on many years ahead of them of
work and travel, dinner with friends, quiet evenings at home with their cat, perhaps one day a house in the
country. But as Leo's periods of lucidity become rarer, those dreams fall away, and Addie finds herself less
and less able to cope with an increasingly unbearable present.
Eventually, Leo is diagnosed with Lewy body disease. Life expectancy ranges from three to twenty years. An
uncharacteristic act of violence makes it clear that he cannot come home. He moves first to an assisted living
facility and then to a small apartment with a caretaker where, over time, he descends into full cognitive decline.
Addie’s agony, anger, and guilt result in self-imposed isolation, which mirrors Leo’s diminished life. And so for
years, all she can do is watch him die—too soon, and yet not soon enough.
From the acclaimed author of Rabbits for Food comes another work shot through with lacerating humor, and
with an acerbic second-person narrator for the ages. Kirshenbaum captures the pair's final years, months, and
days in short scenes that burn with despair, humor, and rage, tracking the brutal destruction of the disease, as
well as the moments of love and beauty that still exist for them.